When I was tired of crying I saw with astonishment that the sun was quite low. Through the branches of my shrubbery I watched the long thin shadows of the poplar trees growing longer than ever on the grass, and quite close to me I saw a long shadow which was moving. It came forward, then stopped, and then came forward again. I understood at once that somebody was going to pass my hiding-place, and almost immediately the man in the white smock walked into the shrubbery, stooping to get out of the way of the branches. I felt cold all over. I soon got control of myself, but I could not help trembling nervously. He remained standing in front of me without saying a word. I sat and looked at his eyes, which were very gentle, and I began to feel warm again. I noticed that, as Eugene used to, he wore a coloured shirt and a cravat tied under the collar, and when he spoke it seemed to me that I had known his voice for a long time. He leaned against a big branch opposite me, and asked me if I had no relations. I said "No." His eye ran along the branch covered with young shoots, and without looking at me he said again, "Then you are all alone in the world." I answered quickly, "Oh no, I have Sister Marie-Aimee!" And without leaving him time to ask any more questions I told him how I had longed for her, and how impatiently I was waiting and hoping to see her again. Talking about her made me so happy that I could not stop talking. I told him of her beauty and of her intelligence, which seemed to me to be above everything in the world. I told him, too, how sorry she had been when I went away, and of the joy that I knew she would feel when she saw me come back. While I talked his eyes were fixed on my face, but they seemed to look much further. After a silence he asked again, "Have you no friends here?" "No," I said; "all those whom I loved have gone;" and I added rather angrily, "They have even turned out Jean le Rouge." "And yet," he said, "Madame Alphonse is not unkind?" I told him that she was neither unkind, nor kind, and that I should leave her without any regret. Then we heard the sound of M. Alphonse's cart-wheels, and I got up to go. He stood aside a little to let me pass him, and I left him alone in the shrubbery. That evening I took advantage of the unusually good humour of Adele to ask her if she knew any of the ploughmen at the Lost Ford. She said she only knew some of the old ones, for since Madame Deslois had been a widow the new ones never stayed with her. A sort of fear which I could not have explained kept me from mentioning the young man in the white smock, and Adele added with a wag of her chin: "Fortunately her eldest son has come back from Paris. The farm hands will be happier."